At
“American Pastiche: Choose Your Own Adventure,” two local painters pay homage to you, the viewer. You're the looker, the chooser; Jose Arenas and Phillip Hua know it, and like it. Arenas’ bees and bell weights float in abstract space, or maybe they're in a room with Situationist wallpaper. He also exhibits a beehive shack-structure with a cool pastel palette of stripes spiked with red — very modern, especially for a beehive. Not that bees don’t have inherent style, we don’t mean to imply that, and certainly Arenas paints bees like none we’ve ever seen. Many are gray, and detailed, with their cargos of gray pollen; they often look both sad and angry. Hua’s mod-stylized dot-matrix trees on yellowing newsprint and warping construction paper have been written about a lot lately, so we'll just say this: There are more of them for this show; more colorful, and bigger.
An opening reception for "American Pastiche: Choose Your Own Adventure" starts at 6 p.m. on Jan. 7.
Jan. 7-15, 2010
